Question: how much lab work to you do with plants daily

Yvette Wilson answered on 12 Jun 2010:

There are different phases of each research project. I have spent a few months getting to grips with what is known on my subject (that was mainly reading and computing). It then took a while to get together all the seeds that I need and get them growing. However, now I’m going into an experimental phase where I’ll be doing a lot of hands on work. The past few weeks I have harvested about12 000 bits of leaves from different plants and still haven’t finished! Then its to the lab for a good few months of doing genetic analyses on all of this material. This will be working in the lab all day, with a few long days if, as always happens, things don’t go smoothly. Then I’ll get a heap of results to go through (mainly computing) that’ll take at least a month and from that I’ll identify which of the plants I want to grow seeds from to look at straw characteristics – ie the cycle starts again.